Issa - A world of grief and pain, Flowers bloom, Even then

苦の娑婆や桜が咲けば咲いたとて (ku no shaba ya sakura ga sakeba saita tote): this world of suffering; and if the cherry blooms, so it has bloomed. 娑婆 is the Buddhist word for this world, from the Sanskrit sahā, the land to be endured, and 苦の娑婆 was Issa's stock phrase for it. とて at the end is the shrug, even granting that, and the verse's two readings, the bitter and the accepting, are both inside that one particle; the poem does not say which. Issa's own verse diary places it between the twelfth and the fifteenth of the second month of 1823, with no occasion given. His own editions print a plainer line, 花が開けばひらく迚, the flower opens, so it opens; the form on this scroll, 桜が咲けば咲いたとて, is the one the English translators took up, and Miyamori, who printed both, called them one verse with the same meaning. The English is Sam Hamill's, from The Spring of My Life, 1997.